I did one more run and a couple of shorter ones to Lublin and Cracov over the weekend. Both car and I need a break. Might try to do it over weekends from now on. Though, really, judging by the sounds it keeps making, I'd better have someone competent look at it for a change.

Having an almost entirely passive understanding of Ukrainian (and, in the case of our guests, Polish) is an ongoing problem. We're using English with the younger ones and German-English with the aunt, which is odd as hell at times. We're doing what we can to make them feel welcomed, but they're still in shock and not entirely settled. And absolutely understandably so, just hope we're not pushing anyone.

After some consideration, I applied to a few IT-sec organizations but don't expect much to come out of it.

Today I had to take Uber to work because I completely blanked on a workshop presentation and did the slides on the back seat. It's actually a fun, largely-informal exercise, and the topic can be pretty much whatever 30-minute problem you think would interest a room full of physics post-grads and above. In my case, it was a couple of constructions following from Euclid Elements' book I, V, and VI, like hyperreals, angle algebras, and complex numbers. It's funny that it took until XIX century for mathematicians to stop using explicit infinities, only to discover it results in much more elementary, albeit epsilon-delta driven, maths. The step from Euclid to modern maths can be smaller than from Euclid to Euler, but only with the benefit of hindsight.

My reading list finally moved to the much-awaited "Beyond a Pale Horse" and other stuff by the conspiracy nutjob Milton William Cooper. The contents are by large not new to me, between games, books, X-Files/Lone Gunmen, and digging into similar stuff on the internet when I'm bored, but it's a concentrated infodump. Not a guilty pleasure by far; I love this nonsense.

The last week's chess puzzle seemed to prod people to respond both here and in private, so here's another one.

Same as before: checkmate in two, White begins. Think what Black's response should be before your second move.

Solution to last week's puzzle..

Dunno if I can make it into a regular thing, but why not try?